By Tevfik Rada (Kosovo)
My dear friend Ele the elephant never gets hangovers because she drinks so much water. That's why she likes to watch films in Kino ne Lum also. She enjoys the cinema on one hand and the cold river water on the other.
We went to Kino ne Lum again to watch the film of Ognjen Glavonic called Zivan Makes a Punk Festival. Ele is so excited about music documentaries (especially punk) because she was a drummer of a punk band when she was living in Granada. They used to play at the corners of the squat buildings.
Glavonic’s film is a semi-fictional documentary that shows us a young guy's adventure in Serbia where he wants to prepare, in three days, a punk festival in the village of Tomasevac. He has no money and he is the only organizer of the festival. So he runs for the copy shops to print the low quality flyers, go to rent the low quality sound systems, distribute the flyers in the streets of Belgrade etc. Somehow he manages to make the punk festival in Tomasevac with four bands (he says it is an international one since there is a band from Slovakia). Few people attend the festival and at the end the result is frustrating for him.
Me and Ele see some problems with the film's approach on making a punk event in an ‘unknown’ place with limited money. It reminds me of Prizren a bit, where making a jam session or forming bands is hard because of the lack of space for making music. So I consider making music as a highly ethical act.
Why is Zivan trying to make a punk festival in Tomasevac and why has it got to be a ‘festival’? In the film we cannot find this answer properly and we are obliged to say that he is doing it because he is stupid. The film flows at this level of parody, which turns the mockumentary into an exotic thing like Borat.
The music category in Dokufest is my favourite one. The most interesting music documentary of this year's festival was, for me, Death Metal Angola of Jeremy Xido. I think one can find the political subversiveness of rock music in that film without the evil touch of exoticism in Angola.
When we went out of the cinema it was already midnight. We grabbed some rakia and headed to DokuNights. There was some punk bands playing there. Me and my friend Ele started to pogo in the middle. You can imagine, perhaps, how it was to pogo with a punk elephant.
